Chapter 7 - A Shadow in the Medical Ledger
By Friday afternoon, the west wing of the mansion had been transformed into a temporary forensic accounting hub. My father’s old associate, David Ross, had arrived from downtown with two high-speed data scanners, setting up his equipment directly across from the children's nursery.
Lawson stood behind him, his sleeves rolled up, a lit cigarette resting between his fingers despite the house rules against smoking. He didn't care about the rules today. He cared about the numbers.
"It’s exactly what the girl said, Lawson," David Ross announced, pointing his pen at a series of encrypted wire entries from a Swiss account registered under Yates' name. "Vanguard Pharmaceuticals wasn't trying to cure Jonah and Blythe. They were using them as 'Patient Zero' for a new line of synthetic white blood cell stabilizers. The drug isn't designed to eliminate the cancer; it’s designed to prolong the chronic phase of the disease so the family has to keep buying the proprietary serum at forty thousand dollars a dose."
Lawson didn't speak. He took a long, slow drag from his cigarette, the tip glowing a hot, angry orange in the dim light of the office. "How long did they know?"
"According to the internal memos from the Zurich lab... they knew the serum was causing liver toxicity three months ago," David said quietly. "But they kept increasing the dosage for your kids because your financial statements showed you had an unlimited capital reserve. They were draining your bank accounts while they let the children's organs fail."
The door opened, and Waverly walked in carrying an empty ceramic bowl. Her hands were stained with fresh ginger juice, and her yellow sweater looked tired, but her eyes were brighter than they had been since she arrived.
"Blythe swallowed three spoonfuls," she said directly to Lawson. "She didn't throw up. She asked for water that didn't taste like the medicine."
Lawson turned around slowly. The cold, calculating killer who had run the Chicago docks for a decade looked at the twenty-seven-year-old woman with the broken sneakers, and for the first time in his life, his hands began to shake.
"They were poisoning them," Lawson whispered, his voice cracking with a raw, primitive grief. "The doctors I paid for. The people I brought into my house to save them. I was paying them to kill my babies."
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Waverly walked over to him. She didn't offer a hollow phrase of comfort. She didn't touch his shoulder. She simply set the empty bowl on the desk beside his whiskey glass.
"Then stop paying them," she said. "And start fighting them."
